What are the Basics of Responsible AI Use?

It would be easy to write an entire textbook focused solely on the ethical considerations tied to the use of GenAI and an entire second textbook on the ethical issues surrounding AI in general. If years of movies depicting artificial intelligence becoming sentient and eventually overthrowing its human creators for control of the Earth have taught us anything, it’s this: using AI ethically and responsibly is anything but simple.

As students in general – and as student writers and researchers, specifically – there’s a lot for you to be aware of as you begin (or continue) to use GenAI as part of your coursework. Since you’ll be diving headfirst into using GenAI to help with your research and some of your writing process, it’s important to take the time now to dig into those considerations and establish a set of guidelines for how you should go about using the technology.

Guidelines

Your Voice Matters Most (Maintain Your Autonomy)

GenAI should never be thought of or used as a replacement for you. It can’t replace your unique ideas, critical thinking, experiences, or creativity. It’s a tool and you should use it as one: something meant to support your learning, not to do the work for you. Remember to never surrender your agency to the machine. You should always be the driver and the ultimate decision maker.

Beware of False Confidence & Bias

GenAI chatbots are programmed to sound like they know what they’re talking about. But we’ve all had moments of ‘faking it till we’re making it’, when we sound like we totally have a clue even when we absolutely don’t. AI is a lot like humans in that way. It will sound great even when it’s completely wrong, generating misinformation, or ‘hallucinating’ fake facts. (Yes, that is a thing it does.) And it’s important to remember where GenAI learns from: the open internet.

I think we all know that if it’s on the internet it’s always true, right?

Because GenAI learns from the internet and because the internet is full of biased and one-sided (and sometimes completely untrue) information, there’s a decent chance that your GenAI results may contain those same biases of those same untruths. Always verify claims generated by AI with trusted sources.

Commit to Transparency & Authorship

Transparency has become a real buzzword over the last few years. But it’s more than that when it comes to the use of AI. Any time you see something online and wonder ‘is this real or is it AI’, that means that the creator wasn’t transparent, which means they weren’t entirely honest.

A lack of honesty is one thing if what we’re talking about is a video of a puppy doing a silly dance on Instagram. It’s something else entirely when we’re talking about medical research, federal laws or guidelines, or even your essay in a first-year English course. Those are areas where honesty isn’t just the best policy, it should be the only policy (especially the first two) and when it comes to AI, it isn’t just about being honest by not having AI do the work for you; it’s also about being honest about when and how you use GenAI.

There are multiple acceptable, ethical, and responsible ways to use GenAI as a student – those might include brainstorming, outlining, and researching just to name a few – but when you use it for those things, you need to acknowledge that use. Disclose that you used GenAI and what tool you used specifically. The rules for what is acceptable, ethical, and responsible use of AI are established by the college and by your individual instructors – what is permitted in one class might be totally unacceptable in another – and you need to make sure you work within those rules and maintain that transparency about it at all times.

Protect Privacy, Property, and People

In some ways, GenAI is one giant data breach. That’s an exaggeration and an oversimplification all at once, but it highlights the issue: GenAI can (and in some cases, does) save everything you put into it – information, documents, prompts – and use it to train their models. Some of you might not care about that just as some artists, writers, and musicians don’t. But many of them (and many of you) do care and it’s something that bothers you.

So, don’t give it to them.

In other words, you should never input personal, private, or sensitive information into an AI tool and you should definitely never input anyone else’s info, either. Respect the intellectual property of human creators if you don’t know how they feel about AI learning from them and remember that AI access isn’t yet equal for everyone.

Stay Informed

Many of us have bought a phone or some kind of electronic device or downloaded software and had to ‘read’ (which really means scrolling past it all and clicking the ‘yes, I read it’ button) the Terms of Service. Those are the rules and regulations about the product. GenAI tools have those as well and that’s where you can find their privacy policies and their specifics about what they do with your data and anything you enter into them, including your prompts.

You need to read those. For real. Not just acknowledge them after scrolling through them. READ!

Because of the speed with which AI changes and the number of new features and new things it can do it rolls out on a regular basis, you need to make it a priority to always understand how the tools you use actually work and what they do with your information. Staying current in understanding the mechanics, limitations, and terms of service for the GenAI tools you use empowers you to make smart and ethical decisions and prevents the AI from undermining your independent thinking.